


Of the Body Condemned

by ladyofrosefire, sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Bruises, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Execution, Fighting, Flogging, Gen, Hanging, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Near Death, Nightmares, Podfic Available, Rescue Missions, Strangulation, Tea, Tenderness, Torture, Trauma, Urination, Vomiting, Whump, dislocations, gibbets, hair petting, hand-holding, physiotherapy, roadhauling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:14:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23043067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyofrosefire/pseuds/ladyofrosefire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: By decree of Her Majesty, the Bright Queen Leylas Kryn, Umavi, Empress of the Kryn Dynasty of Xhorhas, Essek, formerly Thelyss, formerly Shadowhand, is to be taken this day to a place of public execution.(If his friends have any say, he will not stay there.)
Relationships: The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 205
Kudos: 506





	1. Execution

**Author's Note:**

> **Please mind the tags.**

When the Dynasty is sure it has wrung all it can from him, they drag Essek out from the Dungeon of Penance and into the eternal twilight of Rosohna’s streets. Even the half-light blinds him after his time in the dungeon, spent in darkness thick enough to blind even a drow.

With his magic muffled by the cuffs around his wrists, he cannot tell how long has passed. How long he was down there, in the dark, hurting and alone. Weeks, certainly. The dungeon has enchantments woven into its very fabric, though, to confuse the senses, to disorientate. It could have been months, blurred over by the background radiation of raw dunamis, or days stretched into a hellish eternity.

It was time enough for his body to be broken and healed more than once, though. Time enough for his mind to break away in scraps and chunks, from the pain, from the isolation. Time enough for exhaustion to weigh heavy on his limbs and make him slow and clumsy.

When they tie Essek’s mangled hands to a chain leading from the back of a cart, he is too weak to do anything but follow as it is pulled into the streets. Even if he had the strength to run, the _will_ to run, his guards—his torturers, his erstwhile subordinates—follow close behind. The only way they leave him is forward.

The cart turns toward the Shadowshire. He squeezes his eyes shut against the light, stumbling on unsteady legs. No glorious beheading in front of the castle, then. No chance to beg forgiveness from the Queen and be reborn anew. He is to be fed to the mob.

The clamor of the commoners reaches him a moment later. Essek blinks open watering eyes and stumbles again. The wall of sound hits him like a physical entity, and he flinches from it instinctively. He would like to hold his head high, to walk straight behind the cart, but he can barely lift his feet. His bare toes catch on a loose stone in the road, and he falls to one knee. The onlookers roar their approval. A half-rotted melon splatters against his shoulder, slimy and sour, seeping through the rags of his shirt. His face burns.

Essek grits his teeth and forces himself back to his feet. The dull throb from his sprained knee sharpens on his next step forward. They healed him enough he could stand for this, but perhaps not well enough to walk. Perhaps just enough to make walking painful. The Dynasty, it seems, has put quite some thought into stuffing his final moments as full of petty cruelties as they can. He lacks the energy to be impressed.

The cart picks up speed.

He makes it maybe thirty seconds before his legs give out again, the speed too much for injured knees and bare, unsteady feet. He falls again. This time, he is dragged for the length of his body before he draws his knees up, ripping first his pants and then his skin on the rough stones of the road. He stumbles back to his feet, trips, catches himself. His hands jar against the ropes, sending pain lacing through his raw wrists and broken fingers.

 _A precaution_ , his old second had said as he snapped each one in turn, as though the heavy cuffs on his wrists did not already prevent him from casting. He blinks, and he is back in the dungeon, dark and cloying and full of hurting. He blinks again. The crowd roars back to life. He still hurts, everywhere, unrelenting.

He thinks, for a wild moment, that he might be losing his mind. Then he remembers it does not matter. He will be dead within the hour, after all.

A stone strikes his shoulder hard enough to knock him off balance. A voice in the crowd screams obscenities at him, high and cutting over the general jeering. He pitches forward, cracking both elbows on the stone, scraping open his forearms and one cheek. What is left of his shirt tears as he twists feebly, drags at his screaming hands until he can fight his way upright, head tucked to his chest against the hail of filth.

The third time Essek falls, he realizes that they do not expect him to stand. Body jarring, shoulders screaming as his arms are jerked out in front of him, he hits the road once more. He does not have the strength to try and stand. For all that he does not love these people and has never felt any particular loyalty toward them, it still stings. More than he expected, it hurts that they would make his torture so public.

He ducks his head against one arm, keeping his face clear from the scrape of the road, and does his best to protect his eyes.

The pain in his shoulders grows with each foot, tendons and muscles straining, ripping. His joints are drawn apart, dislocated in slow, agonising inches, by the dead weight of his broken body and the relentless progress of the cart. The strain on his chest constricts his lungs, making him fight for breath. He tries to raise his face from his arm and catches a stone to the temple hard enough to white out his vision. His head pounds and swims.

Ahead of him, the cart bounces over a rock, jostling his wrists, his shoulders. He fails to lift his head up—too weak, too hurting, too busy hiding his eyes from more stones and rotting food—and it cracks against his jaw a second later with a noise like a gunshot.

Hot pain explodes through his face. The snap of it shoots all the way through his skull, down his spine, and he _screams_ , chokes, and tastes copper. He blacks out, for a second, and is ripped back to consciousness by the feeling of the road sanding the skin from his cheek.

The crowd howls louder at the noise, baying their approval. He drools blood through his shattered jaw. Screaming makes the pain worse, but it _hurts_ , hurts more than— until a few days ago, he would have said more than anything in his life. He knows better than that now. But it hurts more than he can bear in silence, more than he can take without tears streaming down his bloodied cheeks. His teeth are wrong in his mouth. His tongue tastes of iron filings and salt.

It’s the lack of air that stops him from screaming, eventually. He cannot get enough with his shoulders pulled up and his weight bearing down on them and his chest. His screams trail off to whimpers, gasps, half-muffled in his arm.

Essek nearly sobs with relief when the cart finally stops.

It’s short-lived. The pain flares as rough hands scoop him up, one under either arm. His shoulders scream in protest, the joints loose, bone grinding against displaced bone. The scaffold stands before him, towering above the crowd. If there were anything in his stomach, he would have thrown it up at the sight. He groans as his feet strike the bottom step, no energy left to lift them in even a mockery of walking. Each stair they drag him up cracks against his shins, his ankles.

Still, he finds the strength to struggle when they reach the platform. A deep, instinctual terror of the whipping pole, the noose, rises up until he twists in their grip, trying to pull away. For just a moment, he pushes against the guards’ hold on him—until one turns and slams an armored fist into his jaw.

The pain blinds him once more. The agony of it is bright, phosphorescent, stealing the breath from his lungs and all thoughts of struggle from his head. He slumps back into the guards’ hands, heaving and sobbing, bloody spit dripping down his chin from his misshapen mouth.

The guards loop his cuffs over a hook on the scaffold before dropping him. He doesn’t have the energy to try and catch himself, knees cracking against the hardwood of the platform. One of his shoulders wrenches, pops, and he can’t tell whether it’s been newly dislocated, or just dislocated further. The pain blurs into one, a haze of agony that flares with every inhale.

He’s not sure whether he’s crying or not, but he suspects he is.

Any hope he might have had of retaining some dignity, any dignity, disappears the moment the whip touches his back. He manages one lash, two, without screaming. That, at least, is something. Each crack of the whip lights a line of bloodied fire across his skin. But it is the wet feel of blood dribbling down his spine that sets him sobbing again in the end, heaving for breath against the pain. He is too hurt, too tired, to tolerate anything more, and the blood— the blood is too much. It is more than he can bear, in the smallest possible way.

His torturer doesn’t stop at his sobbing. Does not stop, in fact, for a long time after the point where he starts screaming. The broken jaw is almost a mercy—if he cannot form words, at least he cannot beg them to stop, beg for forgiveness.

It is kind of them, Essek thinks, delirious with pain, to spare him that final and greatest humiliation.

He cannot see where the Queen sits, or if she has only sent one of her dignitaries to oversee this. He cannot see whether his _mother_ is here to watch him die after she disowned him. He cannot see anything through the white-hot haze of pain.

They do not stop until Essek slumps against the whipping post, knees half-sliding out from under him in the slick of his own blood. He groans softly at the reprieve around his swollen tongue, the shattered distortion of his jaw.

A coarse loop of rope drops around his neck. No noble’s silk for him, then, a commoner’s noose, for a common traitor. They untie his hands, and if he had any energy to thrash, he would—but he does not, and so he stays slumped as they hoist him up to his knees, his feet, higher. He sways as he rises, a puppet on a string.

The rope tightens around his neck, and he chokes in slow, painful inches.

He had thought there was no more fight left in him. The visceral feeling of the life being throttled from his battered body proves him wrong. The slow creep of death gives him the energy to kick, to claw at the rope around his throat with broken fingers, to struggle desperately for solid ground and the barest sip of air. It does him no good. But he cannot stay _still_ , not as his vision pulses red and black, and a rushing starts up in his ears.

Essek does not know how long they hold him there, suspended in the air, twisting like a fish on a hook. He only knows that, as the black begins to close in, they drop him to the platform once again, gasping. His throat is bruised, swollen enough that he has to pant for every desperate breath, sprawled face-down against the wood without the strength to hold himself up. He’s fairly sure he pissed himself.

Beyond the rushing still in his ears, he hears the baying approval of the crowd, hungry for his pain. He is not sure how much more he has to give them before his body gives in entirely. That he has survived this far after weeks of torture is an unfortunate miracle, gifted to him by some cruel god.

Someone, somewhere, is talking, voice echoing over the roar of the gathered masses. Essek’s head throbs too much for him to make out the words. He is a creature of stripped nerves and raw, bloody meat. When he’s hauled up by the arms yet again, he can barely manage a weak groan. There’s blood in his mouth, in his eyes, wet beneath his fingers. Every inch of him is bruised, broken, twisted, crimson-slick.

He wonders whether finally, _finally_ , they will let him die. He has been praying for death for weeks, now.

Instead, they shove him inside an iron cage in the shape of a body. It is a challenge getting his twisted limbs and battered form to settle properly inside the structure, but they persevere. Essek vomits, thin bile and dark blood, as they twist one shoulder to settle it inside the cage. His torturers are unperturbed, arranging his other arm with a force bordering on enthusiasm.

He feels the drag of the dunamantic spellwork before they even get the door locked. His stomach heaves. He closes his eyes against the weight of it, choking on the breath in his lungs. Dunamancy is an old friend, an intimate companion; it has never felt like _this_ before, heavy and cruel.

When he forces his eyes open again, the crowd moves in slow motion. Every aching beat of his heart comes so slowly he thinks it might never come at all. Each time, he hopes, waits, prays for it to stop and release him.

Each time, it beats.

They hang his cage outside the Beacon’s range and leave him burning under the morning light.


	2. Liberation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Mighty Nein discover Essek's fate.

“Where is Essek?” Jester demands.

The guards look at each other—clearly disarmed—and do not answer. Caleb’s stomach, already uneasy, ties itself into a hard knot.

“ _Well_?” she continues, hands propped indignantly on her hips. “I sent him a message, and he didn’t answer, which is like. You know. _Really_ rude of him, but also kind of weird, because he _always_ answers me.”

“We… need you to come with us.”

Beau shifts, foot sliding back, balance shifting subtly but meaningfully. “No. _You_ need to answer our question.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” interjects Fjord. He steps forward slowly, palms open. “Just a minor misunderstanding. Of course, we’ll go with them, Beau. But—where is the Shadowhand? We were expecting him to meet us, and you can understand our being a little… nervous.”

The guards look at each other and then at their group, and the knot of Caleb’s stomach climbs into his throat. “What has happened to him?”

“He was taken to be executed just this morning,” one says, and Jester muffles a cry in both hands. “He’s hanging from the north wall, now.”

“He’s—” Jester whispers. Her hands are still pressed to her mouth, the color drained from her face. “They killed him?”

One of the guards shrugs, visibly uncomfortable. “That tends to be what happens, at executions.”

They move almost as a group, Yasha seizing Fjord by the back of the armor and hauling him with her from where he stands dumbstruck. Jester barrels through one of the guards as she runs out of the room and onto the street, _screaming_. Caleb chases her, Veth at his heels.

The guards leave them be, and why wouldn’t they? What could they do with a corpse?

For all that there is no reason for them to run, they cannot bring themselves to slow. Beau and Veth rein themselves in just enough to not outpace the others, but that is the extent of their restraint. When they exit through the northern gate of Rosohna through the dome of night and into the afternoon sunshine, they are ragged around the edges, gasping and clutching at one another. Jester has abandoned screaming for barely-constrained sobs. The air around Yasha crackles faintly.

A wrought-iron, body-shaped cage hangs on the wall before them. And, in it, Essek. A cool, detached portion of Caleb’s brain reminds him that they are supposed to be able to see his bruised, swollen face, the blood on the bars, the way his head hangs, and the raw line around his throat. There is no lesson, after all, if it cannot be observed. But the sight still sends a shock through him.

The cage sways slowly in the wind, Essek swaying within it, and Caleb feels sick. The Shadowhand is limp, doll-like, a twist of shattered limbs and pulped flesh held together by the latticework of iron wrapped around his broken body. It’s more than Caleb can bear to look at—the efficient, savage cruelty of it is breathtaking. Overwhelming.

Beside him, Caduceus lets out a rush of breath. “Hey. His eyes opened.”

“No,” says Caleb, because that— that would be unbearable. “ _No_.”

“Look.”

Caleb does not want to, but he does. Beside him, Yasha gasps. Fjord swears. Jester makes a high, keening sound, and Caleb wants to join her because Essek raises his head a fraction and blinks, very slowly. A drop of bloodied saliva rolls down his chin, escaping from the slack, fractured mess of his jaw.

Beside Caleb, Yasha _roars_.

And, once more, they all move together.

Caleb and Jester start at the same moment, but she is faster, sweeping her hands up and screaming. No words, no ‘hello, bees’ this time as she conjures a swarm at the top of the wall, just a raw, animal yell. The guards there recoil, shouting, as insects surround them. Caleb ignores them, fingers finding the phosphorus in his pocket automatically. He sweeps a line of it across his palm, and fire rips across the dry grass, starting from their side of the gate and cutting off a semicircle of ground.

Veth races past him, tar dripping between her fingers. She reaches the wall and runs up it, all her speed focused on vertical movement. When she gets close enough, she leaps onto the cage with a shriek. It swings wildly at the impact, and Caleb swears he sees Essek’s bloodied mouth form a silent groan.

Beau does not run up the wall, but instead digs her fingers into the cracks of the stones and propels herself upward in unnatural leaps. The last one carries her above the top of the wall. A guard’s body plummets a moment later, a second toppling in the opposite direction.

Caduceus finishes his blessing just as a company of guards with loaded crossbows burst through the gate.

Caleb takes two bolts—one in the shoulder and the second in the thigh—and he staggers for a moment, but holds, teeth gritted and blood already soaking through his clothes. Beau dodges the bolts aimed at her easily, as does Veth. Fjord is less lucky and cries out as an arrow sinks deep into the soft meat of his stomach. Caduceus starts toward him, knocking aside a bolt with his shield and glancing toward Yasha as she charges forward, her face a mask of icy rage, through the fire and out to where the guards stand frantically reloading. Fjord extends a dripping hand to the air above her and calls out a word in an alien language that hurts the ears of those close enough to hear.

Caleb does not bother to watch the vrock tear its way into the material plane.

The buzzing of the bees gets louder, and a giant lollipop sweeps through the fire to hit the guards, a bolt of greenish radiant energy close behind. Caleb breaks off the arrows jutting out of his body, the pain sharp, but inconsequential.

“Burn,” he commands, and rays of fire shoot off of his hand to strike three of the guards.

Above him, Veth clings to the cage, swearing loudly as she worries at the lock. She shrieks in triumph, and then in alarm as the cage door tries to swing open, still several feet off the ground. He looks up to find her clinging to it with her arms and legs wrapped around the bars, desperately holding Essek inside.

He turns, scans the battle. In another few seconds, they will have Essek, but they will have to fight their way out. He could cast Polymorph—

Another arrow cuts off his train of thought, striking him just below the ribs. He doubles over, gasping, and the wall flickers for a moment before he resumes his chant. He catches a flicker of magic at the top of the wall and cuts a hand through the air, snuffing the spell out before it can begin. It never touches Beau, leaving the mage with a hand outstretched in her direction and a look of frustration.

Beau looks down at Caleb from the winch and salutes.

Yasha’s roar reverberates off of the city wall, over the crackle of the fire and Veth’s shrieking. She whirls through the guards with Skingorger, Fjord at her side, green blasts leaping from his fingers. They are a force of nature, the two of them—but it is only a matter of time before they are overrun by the steadily amassing guards.

Caleb has no idea how to get them to safety.

Jester runs to the wall as the cage comes down, waving wildly. “I can get us home! You guys, over here, hurry _up_!”

He rushes over to her, as fast as pain the bolts buried in his flesh will allow. They are on borrowed time now. The guards are calling reinforcements, and with Essek undoubtedly too fragile to take even a glancing hit, they must all be ready to move the second he is released. And they need to release him _soon_.

“Caleb— Caleb, I don’t know if I can bring everyone—”

There’s panic in Jester’s voice, but Caleb finds his oddly steady. “Leave Fjord, Yasha, and Veth. I have them.”

She nods, teeth digging into her lower lip, and raises her hands.

“Leave me?!” screeches Veth. She turns and shoots the guard attacking Yasha. “Fine! If you have a plan—”

The wound in Caleb’s side, the ones in his shoulder and thigh, pulse in time to his heart. He swallows back the dizziness. A moment longer. He only has to hold the fire for a moment longer.

Beau lands beside them, already grabbing for the cage’s door, at the same moment that Caduceus arrives at the wall. His hands find Essek’s bloody chest the moment Beau pulls him from the cage, lichen springing up under his hands and falling away again with no visible effect. In Beau’s arms, Essek shudders, draws in a gurgling breath, and falls still. Caduceus’ magic flares again, this time in the familiar warmth of Spare the Dying.

The first time he had seen it had been among the Iron Shepherds—

There is no time to waste.

“On three—” Caleb turns toward the group. “One, two—”

The wall of fire falls. Beside him, Veth's yowl morphs into an eagle’s shriek at the same time that Fjord and Yasha’s forms shift and grow feathers.

“Three!” Jester finishes. “Xhorhaus!”

The last thing Caleb sees is the guards taking aim.

A moment later, they appear on the roof beneath Caduceus’ tree. Beau and Caduceus have Essek propped up between them. Essek, who wheezes audibly, wetly, a long rattle Caleb has heard too many times.

Once again, Essek’s breathing stops, choked off in his chest as blood drips from his mouth and nose.

“Put him down gently,” Caduceus murmurs, hands already glowing. “There we go…”

Caleb pulls chalk from his bag and sets to frantic scrawling, counting the seconds. Five pass and Essek chokes on an inhale, more blood dribbling from his mouth. Caleb curses under his breath and continues drawing. He refuses to let his hands shake, to ruin this circle, and doom them. He completes the first of the five rings just before Essek nearly dies again, groaning out another death rattle. Caduceus does not stop chanting after that, healing words and prayers for divine mercy mingling into a low rumble.

From below comes the sound of shouting.

Beau rushes to the ledge, dropping to one knee so she can peer over it without losing cover. “Shit. Fuck, we’ve got incoming!”

“Can you see the others?”

Caleb can still feel three eagles under his concentration. He refuses to let himself think about them being shot down.

He closes the third circle, and Essek sucks in air like a drowning man only to lose it again.

“His heart keeps stopping!” Jester quavers. When he glances up, just for a moment, just to see, he finds her digging out a diamond and clutching it, poised over Essek’s chest.

The stink of blood fills the air.

Caleb draws the fourth circle.

“ _Beauregard—_ ”

“They’re not here yet.”

He does not ask if she means their friends or the city soldiers. With a single rune left, he pauses, waits, and listens for wingbeats, or for the door to fall. Jester gives the diamond to Caduceus and hurries to the wall beside Beau. Gold spills between her fingers, turning to dust, and then to blazing light. It floods the street in front of the house like a miniature sun, and the incoming soldiers falter and fall back.

“I see them!” Beau shouts. She jumps up, waving her arms, and barely falters when a poorly aimed arrow whizzes past.

The eagles land a second after they hear the first crash against their door.

Caleb lets the spell go, and Fjord almost tumbles off his feet before Yasha steadies him.

It’s the work of seconds to finish the last rune in the circle, fingers tracing it almost automatically as the chalk lines flare purple with arcane energy. “Go. _Go_!” Caleb snaps.

Caduceus lifts Essek into his arms. Essek chokes, weakly, for what seems like the thousandth time in the scant few minutes since they freed him. He ceases to breathe again with a wet gurgle of blood, but there is no time to stop right now.

“Just a moment longer, now, come on,” murmurs Caduceus to the broken body in his arms, achingly careful with Essek as he strides forward into the circle and vanishes.

Veth passes through next, then Beau, dragging a Yasha who looks like she would rather stay and murder everyone in the city than flee. Jester and Fjord disappear at the same moment, stumbling into the circle together. Caleb steps through after them, and the last thing he hears before the spell whisks him away is the breaking of wood from the front door of the house.

They tumble out of the circle in Yussa’s tower, bleeding, panting. Essek is horribly silent.

Caduceus murmurs Spare the Dying again, and Essek inhales, wheezing horribly in the echoing room. His ragged breaths fill the room. There’s a small pool of blood gathering by Caduceus’s feet, and it’s not from the firbolg himself.

“I’ll—send a message?” Jester starts, uncertain, into the tense quiet. “To… Wensforth. Um, hello! It’s the Mighty Nein. Weeeee’re coming in… in a minute? Thank you so much! Do you have healing potions? I think he might—” She chokes on the words, eyes still fixed on Essek. There’s so much blood. So much _damage_. It’s hard to imagine healing potions making any impact at all.

Veth takes out her lockpicks, eyeing the cuffs on Essek’s wrists. Caleb stays frozen, leaning heavily on Beau as his eyes track the unsteady rise and fall of Essek’s chest. Not dead, then. _Not dead_.

For now, at least.

“Fjord,” Caduceus murmurs as he carefully, slowly, lays Essek on the floor, as though too quick a descent could stop his breathing once more. Perhaps it could, with Essek’s life seemingly hanging by the thinnest of threads. “Come here. I think I need your help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jester casts Fuck off and _Die._
> 
> Come and join us on the writing discord, [Haven!](https://discord.gg/WPywUy7)
> 
> The authors thrive on comments! 🖤🖤🖤


	3. Remedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The healing begins.

Caduceus has barely finished asking for help before Fjord comes to kneel on the other side of Essek’s prone form. “What do you need me to do?” he says, soft, as though they are attending to a deathbed.

Perhaps they are. Caleb tries not to think about that.

“Lay on hands,” Caduceus replies, equally soft, folding his cloak into a pillow. “He has a bad infection, and it’s stopping me from healing him. I want to save everything I have for fixing… all this.”

“Hey— Wensforth says Yussa’s visiting Allura. I’m going to go ask him if we can stay, if he has anything that might— help.” Jester steps toward the door, her eyes still on Essek.

“That’s a good idea,” Beau replies. At her sides, her hands clench into fists. “I… I don’t think we can move him.”

“No,” Caduceus agrees. He sounds as close to stressed as Caleb’s ever heard. It’s frightening, and he never wants to hear it again.

The door opens and shuts with a soft click.

Fjord presses unsteady hands to Essek’s chest, sea-green light spilling from his palms. The sound Essek makes is— cracked. _Painful_. But when it ends, the feverish cast is gone from his half-open eyes, and his wounds weep only blood. Slowly, he blinks, blinks again, eyelids fluttering, and eyes unfocused but no longer glassy. His lips part a little further, to draw in a hitching breath, and he moans almost inaudibly with the movement.

“Fuck,” Beau hisses. “His face— they—” She gathers herself. “Caduceus, his jaw.”

Essek’s whole face shifts, in a way faces should not, his cheeks and the line of his jaw _wrong_ in a subtle, awful sort of way.

“I see it,” Caduceus replies.

He sets large hands on Essek’s face, feeling along the distended jaw until he finds the correct points. Caleb looks away after that. Just for a moment. He does not see the way Caduceus moves the bone, but he hears the sharp sound of it going back into place. Hears Essek’s strangled cry. He quiets a moment later, breath still ragged, but dryer.

Caduceus wipes the blood and spit away from Essek’s chin and cheeks with gentle hands, magic still playing around his fingertips. He pauses with his hands hovering over Essek’s shoulders. The joints are distended, swollen, dislocated in a way obvious enough for even Caleb’s inexpert eye to notice.

“…Could you get Jester back, for me, Caleb? I’m going to need a little help.”

“…Of course.” He takes out the wire and points it in the most likely direction, relaying the message without taking his eyes from Essek’s bruised face.

A moment passes before he hears Jester’s soft, “Okay.”

She reenters the room a minute later and goes immediately to kneel beside Caduceus. “Hey, Essek. We’re gonna make you better, okay?” Her voice shakes, though she tries to hide it. “Caduceus?”

“I’ll hold him steady,” he says, touching Jester’s shoulder. “I need you to put his shoulders back together. Be careful, and go slow.”

If not, she could easily break his arm trying to force it. Caleb saw it happen once when Eodwulf was injured in training. They attempted to fix it themselves, and only succeeded in making it worse—

For a moment, the world seems underwater. The room spins. Time goes loose, liquid, and Caleb feels unmoored in a sea of memory and horror. Then he sucks in a deep breath, holds it, lets it out. The room comes, unpleasantly, back into focus.

Jester takes a deep breath, and all of them watch silently as she carefully, slowly straightens Essek’s arm, gasping softly as she tries to find a patch of unbroken skin large enough to hold without hurting.

“Sorry,” she whispers, then pulls.

Essek _screams_ , but Caduceus’ hold on him keeps him from thrashing. He goes still a moment later, a high, rasping whine slipping from his throat along with what might be words.

Beau, shaking, takes a half step forward. “Can he hear—” She switches languages, then, saying something in what Caleb assumes is Undercommon, low and urgent.

Essek does not respond. His whining tapers off into gasping, his chest heaving shallowly for breath.

“ _Sorry_ ,” Jester says, desperately, tears on her cheeks, and pops his other shoulder back into its joint.

Again, he screams—though he does not try to move this time beyond a bone-deep tremor that runs through him in long waves.

“There you go,” Caduceus soothes, pouring magic into his shoulders, into his chest and lungs. For a moment, it glows so brightly that Caleb can see each of Essek’s ribs backlit behind his skin. “They really did a number on you, didn’t they…?”

The light sinks deeper, and Essek sobs, coughs, and twitches as though he means to curl around his stomach.

Jester shushes him gently and pets his hair with one hand. The other wipes the tears from her cheeks, businesslike and surreptitious. “It’s okay. We’ll make you better. We— Caduceus, his hands, next. Do we have anything for pain?”

“I’m afraid not,” he frowns. “Let me…” He lays a hand against Essek’s brow. “This will help.”

Essek fights it, brow furrowing. Then the spell takes hold, and he goes slack and pliant, fear and tension draining from his face.

“I’ll cast it again in a minute.”

Caleb snaps his fingers, and Frumpkin appears by Essek’s head. The cat begins to lick the sweat and blood from his hair, purring loudly. Caleb remains by the door, arms tightly crossed. The room is starting to swim again; he’s not sure if it’s blood loss, this time, or the dissociation back with a vengeance. Perhaps both.

Essek whimpers with each bone they slot back into place, despite the artificial calming of his emotions. It’s delicate work, piecing his ruined hands back together, straightening the long, elegant fingers, making the bones whole again. Caduceus keeps the calm on Essek for as long as he can, but it runs out with four digits left to set. Jester pins his hand down while Caduceus finishes the work, and Essek chokes back cries, as though he expects them to hurt him for making noise.

By the time they’re finished, there are tears on Jester’s face again, and Essek trembles in the fine, barely-visible way that speaks to bone-deep hurt and exhaustion. Even Caduceus looks a little unsteady, the most visibly rattled the firbolg has ever been.

“There,” he says, heaving a deep breath and stroking a matted curl of white hair back from Essek’s forehead. “That’s… enough for one evening, I think.”

“That’s it?” demands Beau. There is still so much damage, the abrasions and whip marks and bruises, and more. It hardly seems as though they’ve done anything at all. “You can’t— there’s nothing else you can do?”

Caduceus hums softly, his hand drifting to brush over Frumpkin’s fur where the cat is still curled up by Essek’s ear. “There’s only so much magic the body can take in one go,” he says, the calm in his voice belied by the tightness around his eyes and mouth. He looks _angry_. Not at Beau, but angry all the same. “Especially when you’ve starved it and exhausted it, and broken it and healed it for weeks before. The rest of this… it’ll keep, for a night. We’ll get him some bandages, and let him sleep, and fix him up in the morning. Besides,” he adds, flexing his hands with a faint grimace and finally looking up at the worried Nein clustered around him, “I’m about tapped, I’m afraid.”

“I have a little more,” Jester offers, small and quiet. She sniffs and goes to wipe at her eyes with the back of her hand, stopping as she catches sight of the blood on it.

“Why don’t you help Caleb,” Caduceus suggests, “Get those arrows out. I’ll… start a prayer for everyone else.”

They find a quiet landing on the stairway, and Jester helps Caleb to remove his coat.

“Oh—” She bites hard at her lower lip. “Oh, Caleb. Okay. We… we really need to get something for pain, you know? Because, um, you know… This is going to hurt, a little bit.”

Bracing a hand on Caleb’s chest, she draws the bolt carefully, _slowly_ from Caleb’s stomach. Blood flows freely after it. Caleb gags and curls around the injury, tasting bile and copper on the back of his tongue.

A moment later, the cool mint of her magic chases it away.

The arrow in his shoulder is easier to remove, having punched all the way through to emerge just above his shoulder blade—no wonder he’d been having trouble moving that arm. The bolt in his thigh scrapes against bone as she draws it out, and Caleb allows himself a single scream, teeth gritted, into his clenched fist before Jester soothes that hurt as well.

Caleb heaves in a few ragged breaths, hands braced on the edge of the staircase railing. When the urge to scream again subsides, he looks to where Jester sits beside him. “…Thank you,” he says, voice ragged.

Jester’s lower lip wobbles, and she bursts into tears.

Without a word, Caleb holds out his arms. She falls into them, face buried against his shoulder, hands curled into tight fists against his back. Her whole body shakes with the force of her sobs. He hesitates a moment before stroking her shoulder blade, carefully, the way he would pet Frumpkin.

It seems to work. The shaking eases, and her breathing steadies, although she continues to cry into the collar of his shirt.

“I— hate them,” she gasps, “I hate them. How— could they— they _hurt_ him! They hurt him _so bad_ , I don’t—” She hiccups, and then dissolves into sobs again, words insensible against Caleb’s neck.

Caleb keeps holding her, a knot in his throat, until her sobs give way to sniffles—and keeps holding her after those stop, too. She keeps leaning on him. He keeps rubbing circles into her back.

“Why would they do that?” Jester asks, finally, almost inaudible.

There is an answer, which she would hate, so Caleb says nothing. She likely knows already, as it is. It will not help her to know about capital punishments and theories of deterrence. It will not help her to know that there are people out there who enjoy hurting others, just to hear them scream.

He stays silent, dries his eyes, as subtly as he can, and waits with her until she is ready to go back into the teleportation room.

Inside, they find the others cleaning up the blood from the floor and their armor. Essek lies on a bedroll in the corner with Frumpkin tucked purring against his side, his face bruised and drawn, unconscious. Someone, while they were out, dressed him in spare clothes. One of Caleb’s extra shirts, Beau’s reversible coat, and Fjord’s pants, too large at the waist and too long. Yasha’s shawl cushions his head, softening the press of the flagstone floor against bruised, bloody cheeks.

The others lay out their blankets on the other side of the room. Caduceus offers them each a cup of tea, stirring a generous spoonful of honey into Jester’s before handing it to her. She gulps it down. Caleb sips his as he sets up his bedroll next to Veth’s and lays the alarm thread across the door.

“I’m going to wait up with him for a while,” Caduceus whispers, settling beside Essek’s sleeping form. The breath still wheezes in Essek’s bruised throat, shallow and painful-sounding, with every inhale. “Just in case. I think he’ll be alright, though.”

“I’ll go next,” Jester offers. She fluffs her pillow half-heartedly before lying down. She’s still sniffling, on and off, whenever she catches sight of Essek.

Beau turns onto her other side and reaches out to take Jester’s hand.

“I’ll take the morning watch, then.” Caleb keeps his eyes fixed on his spool of thread, as he lays it out in careful inches “Wake me when it’s time.”

They go to sleep uneasily, all of them listening on edge for the rhythm of Essek’s slow, strained breaths to falter. One by one, though, they drop off: Veth, Fjord, Yasha, Beau, Jester.

“Go to sleep, Mr. Caleb,” Caduceus rumbles eventually, into the darkness. “I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”

It takes Caleb’s eyes a long time to close, nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At four levels of exhaustion, a creature has: Disadvantage on ability checks, speed reduced to half, disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws, and their hit point maximum halved.
> 
> Come and join us on the writing discord, [Haven!](https://discord.gg/WPywUy7)
> 
> The authors thrive on comments! 🖤🖤🖤


	4. Salve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Essek wakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, the total chapter count has gone up! The work is still finished, we're just splitting the final chapter, as it was a bit long.

Once in the night, Essek wakes on the noose again, choking and gasping and unable, at first, to haul in enough air. His toes cannot find ground, his hands cannot loosen the rope pulled tight around his neck, and he _cannot breathe_. He cannot breathe. His bladder voids itself, and his legs kick wildly at nothing, and his chest tightens as though his ribs are trying to rip free of the flesh around them. In his ears is the roaring of the crowd and the rushing of his blood. He is going to die here, ignoble and pathetic and afraid, suspended in the air for all of Xhorhas to watch, to see, to _mock_ —

“Essek.” It is, somehow, Jester’s voice. Hers is not the voice he expected to hear on his deathbed. The dying mind, he presumes, must conjure the most irrational of hallucinations as it shuts down piece by tortured piece. “Essek, it’s okay. I have tea? And a potion? Let’s try the potion first.”

He does not want whatever poison they plan to pour into him. But the hand at the back of his head is firm, and he is weak. A glass vial touches his lips. He refuses to open them.

But, instead of pain, instead of someone holding his nose shut until he gasps, he hears Jester again. “Will you open your eyes? Please?”

He does. He finds her staring down at him on the brink of tears, tired, bloody, a potion bottle clutched in one hand.

“J—” he coughs, “Wh—”

“It’s me. I promise. I gave you a cupcake that one time, remember? And we— we tried to get you to go in the hot tub and kept staring at your feet—” Her voice breaks.

They had flogged the skin off the bottoms of his feet, at some point, until he was bloody and sobbing because his throat was too raw to scream any more. And then he hadn’t been able to walk when they had dragged him through the city, and—

He opens his mouth. The potion is herbal, familiar, and soothes his throat on the way down. Jester gives him the tea after it, in small, honey-sweet sips, while he is too tired to protest being hand-fed.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I’m right here. Go back to sleep.”

She runs cool fingers through his hair and across his forehead, again and again, in a steady rhythm. Slowly and gently, careful not to scrape him with her nails. She touches him as he imagines one might to comfort a child, and his chest tightens with all her unfamiliar tenderness. And yet his breath eases just a little bit. He closes his eyes.

When he wakes again, it’s Caleb by his bedside, and the whole room smells green. Essek groans, closing his eyes against the pain of the dim light. The dark of the dungeons had not been good for his eyes; the ceaseless glare of the sun when they hung him out to burn had been even worse. He does not know what to call the light in here, at first. That would require him to open his eyes and _check_.

There is the sound of shuffling—one person rising, another approaching. Someone lays a cool hand across his face, and he flinches, an animal, panicking sound breaking from his raw throat. Jester’s potion had not worked, then, or had not worked enough. Whatever spell the hand’s owner casts soothes his eyes, though, along with the last of the pounding in his head. It also leaves him all that much more aware of the hurt in every other part of his body.

And yet— it is better than it was. His shoulders do not feel so _wrong_. He can move his jaw. His world is no longer _entirely_ pain; only mostly.

Slowly, Essek opens his eyes again.

Caduceus smiles down at him so gently that Essek cringes from it. “I’m sorry we couldn’t do more for you last night.” he pauses, then, for long enough to let his words sink in. Then he settles back on his heels and continues. “I’d like to start with your back if that’s alright. I couldn’t close that up, and I’m worried about it getting re-infected.”

Essek does not want to think about the state of his back. He wants to sleep, or to run, or perhaps both. He’s not entirely sure. _Anything_ is better than reminded that he is trapped in this raw shell, this wreck of a body, hurting and vulnerable.

“Here, let me help you—”

Essek shakes his head. Even that hurts, although less than he had expected. He digs the heels of his hands into the floor, noting the pain of new skin rather than torn, and tries to lever himself up. He makes it six inches before his strength gives out.

Caduceus catches him before his head can strike the floor. “Easy now… there’s nothing wrong with needing a little support.”

He bristles, for all the good it does him. Then he lets Caduceus draw him upright, leaning him against his chest like a sick child or an old man. The shoulder beneath his chin smells of mushrooms and earth after rain. He focuses on that and not on how his stomach roils as Caduceus helps him out of his borrowed shirt, the flare of pain in his shoulders, the expectation of more to follow. No one is sitting behind him, and so no one sees the mess of Essek’s back before it is healed, except for Caduceus as he looks over Essek’s shoulder.

“Oh, good. You’re doing nicely,” Caduceus informs him, as though there is anything _nice_ about this. “Here we go. Let’s just— this is going to itch for a second.”

It does not _itch_. It feels as though the whole of his skin tries to walk across his back. Essek shudders and swallows over and over, as his empty stomach roils. When it is done, his back has skin on it again. Most of the dried blood flakes away with the lichen that seems to come with Caduceus’ healing magic.

Essek drags his head up. “Why?” he rasps.

“Why is your back healing?”

“ _Why_?” he repeats, shaking his head, stopping abruptly when it makes the nausea flare. It hurts to speak, but he has to try. “Why did— you—?”

“Oh,” Caduceus sets his hands against Essek’s tender ribs. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Jester comes to sit by him, taking his aching hand in both of hers. “We’re your friends.”

“—Kill you—” Essek wheezes, “—too. They—”

“They can _try_ ,” Yasha replies.

All of them gathered while Caduceus worked. They sit or stand in a loose circle, the two clerics at his side, watching. Witnesses to his suffering, his helplessness. The thought curdles in his unsteady stomach. He resists the urge to bury his face in the crook of Caduceus’ neck. He is no child to think they cannot see him just because he cannot see them.

Jester cups his cheek with a cool hand, spreading a mint chill through the bruises and broken skin. “It’s gonna be okay. We’re good at avoiding people who are angry with us.”

Essek watches them all for a moment and then makes a noise that might be close to a laugh, gurgling in his throat. It sends him coughing, chest heaving, face screwed up against the pain of the movement.

“All— mad,” he manages, when he can breathe again— and Luxon, isn’t that a luxury after days of hanging breathless and choking, the simple act of being able to fill his lungs.

“Probably,” Fjord shrugs. His gentle pat on the shoulder pours magic into Essek’s body. It’s a little thing, but it’s enough to soothe his chest for now. “But we’ve done alright so far.”

“Besides, Essek, you’re our _friend_ ,” Jester adds.

Their magic fills him, mint and moss and seafoam, and Essek thinks he might drown in it. It tickles his throat and his lungs and makes his ribs ache.

“Water, please?” he rasps.

He cannot hold the cup on his own. They have fixed the breaks in his hands, but the muscles and tendons are still damaged, tender. He almost drops the cup before Caduceus steadies it for him. It is harder to accept the assistance in waking, but he is so thirsty he thinks his throat might crack open and bleed if he does not drink something. He swallows his pride along with the water.

“How long… how long was I there?” he asks, finally. “In— in that cage?”

“From what we can tell, ah… a few hours, or so.” Caleb rubs at his arms through the sleeves of his coat. “The guard we spoke to said it had been that morning, that you were taken to be— that you were taken.”

_Hours._

The room spins, and Essek groans, involuntarily. If not for Caduceus’ hands on him, he might have slumped to the floor. _Hours_. It had felt like an age, hanging there. Weeks, _months_ perhaps, suspended in that cage and dying, choking, _burning_ … He isn’t sure how to process the eternity he experienced, how to press the length of it down into a few short hours. His stomach twists, heaves, and he nearly loses the meager quantity of water he’d managed to choke down.

“I thought—” he begins and then swallows the rest of the words and the bile rising in his throat. They do not need to know about this, about his suffering in the jaws of a device he helped create. “I am keeping you from your work.”

“Would you like some time alone?” Caduceus asks. His gaze runs Essek through, and so he refuses to meet it. “I’d like to see you healed a little more.”

“Do as you like.”

He knows, with distance, that it could not have been days in that cage. The sun never set, after all. But the thought of it still makes his hands shake and his breath catch in his throat. He could lose himself to wondering and what-ifs, but they keep him here in this tower room.

Essek almost cannot watch Jester and Caduceus as they work, no matter how skilled they are. She does something that lifts some of the weight of exhaustion from him, and it reminds him of how tired he is, still, even with the careful wash of their healing through his aching bones. His eyelids droop, and he sways where he sits. Around him, the room spins. They keep him steady and help him back into the shirt. There is relief in that, too, in having whole cloth between his body and the world and the eyes of his friends.

Gently, Caduceus lays him back down on the bedroll. It is a thin covering on a hard floor, and yet it is the most comfortable thing Essek has felt in what feels like months. A feather bed could not feel more inviting, he is sure, with the way the tiredness yawns like a gaping mouth the moment his head touches the bedroll’s makeshift pillow.

“You sleep, Essek,” Caduceus tells him, dropping another one of those deadening calm spells over him, like a heavy blanket. “We’ll all be here.”

This time, he does not fight it; he sinks fast and deep into the dragging, inevitable darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come and join us on the writing discord, [Haven!](https://discord.gg/WPywUy7)
> 
> The authors thrive on comments! 🖤🖤🖤


	5. Reflection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation. A conclusion.

His dreams are as unsteady in this unconsciousness as they were in the last. He is back in his cell, chained, bound, the stench of his own terror and sickness thick in his nostrils. It is dark, dark enough that even his sensitive eyes cannot see through the swirling blackness – and then there is light, a single point of it, cherry-red and glowing in the corner of his vision. Getting closer, slow and inexorable, until he can no longer see it but can feel the _heat_ of it against his heaving ribs.

He tries to struggle, but he is chained tight, thoroughly restrained, and is weak, besides, from the long weeks of torture and deprivation. His chains hiss and rattle, but he cannot move, and the heat is getting closer, and his skin is starting to prickle with sweat, and the heat is _still getting closer_. He would scream, but his tongue is numb, his jaw shattered and aching, and he cannot make a sound. There is nothing to do but lie there, nothing to do but _take_ it, helpless, as the cherry-glow touches fire to his skin. It presses deeper, sinks into spaces between his ribs, lights him up from the inside out with pain, and he _still cannot scream_ —

Something touches his face.

Essek jackknifes upright, snapping one hand out and rasping a command, the stink of burning flesh still in his nose. The orange cat in front of him registers at the same time as the pain in his hands, and just a moment before he realizes that he has turned Caleb’s familiar into a grease spot.

Slowly, he looks up.

Caleb stands in the doorway with a tray in his hands, shock and concern flitting over his face before it settles on resignation. None of the anger that Essek had expected.

“Well.”

“Sorry,” Essek croaks. He cradles his hands against his chest, fighting the urge to whimper like an injured animal and crawl into the corner of the room.

A dream. It had been a dream; only memories twisted and warped. His jaw had not been broken until later, and the heat in his lungs had been first infection and then healing magic. But his hands still shake, and he cannot dislodge that acrid, meaty stink.

Caleb sets the tray down on the floor between them and reaches for a pocket. “Do you mind if I resummon—”

Essek flinches before he can stop himself. “Not… right now. Please.” He cannot quite keep the tremor from his voice.

The only response is a nod, and that is— good. It is _normal_ , and as such more comforting than any assurance that Caleb could have offered. Essek suspects he knows this.

He eyes first Caleb, and then the tray. The food and the tea on it might smell good, if not for his dream. He reaches for the teacup anyway. Curling his fingers makes them throb, and he fails to hide his hiss of pain.

“Could— ah. Could I help you? Please?” Caleb asks.

“I.” Essek pauses to clear his dry throat, to hide the sharp bite of humiliation at his own helplessness. “I can— feed myself.”

“I am sure you can. But… I will feel better if I can help. And Jester will be glad to know you were not alone. It would be a favor.”

“I don’t need to be coddled!”

The ploy is so obvious—the reframing of who is aiding who, the weight of Jester’s investment in him, and the idea of her being upset. Essek regrets the rejection as soon as he gives voice to it, but he cannot take it back.

“No. You do not,” Caleb acknowledges. He hesitates, then reaches slowly toward him, palms out and empty. “But I am concerned. I would… I would like to set my mind at ease. I will do nothing but steady the cup if that is what you want. Please, Essek. You do not have to do this alone.”

Essek eyes him for a long second, and then reaches out, lightly touching his fingers to the center of one of Caleb’s palms. “… I’m not hungry. Not now.”

“Some tea, then? The rest can wait.”

“If it will keep Jester at bay.”

The ache in Essek’s hands turns hot and sharp as he curls both of them around the mug. He sets his jaw and forces himself to lift it, to bring it to his mouth, to hold it steady for long enough to take a sip. Some of the tea spills as he tries to lower it again, dampening the front of his borrowed shirt. Essek swears once, in Undercommon, and just barely manages not to drop the cup on the floor. By the time he manages to set it down safely, unsteadily, his hands are cramping viciously, stabs of pain through his palms, and up his wrists.

Caleb’s lips twist, and he withdraws a jar from an inside coat pocket. It is squat, made of clay and sealed with waxed cloth and a cord fixed beneath the lid. There is no label.

“May I?” he asks, holding it up.

Essek frowns. “What is it?”

“Beeswax, some herbs, some oils. For the pain and the stiffness. Caduceus made it.” He opens the jar, and the smell of summer and sage drifts through the room. “If you would rather I called for him, or for Jester, I…”

“…No, this is fine. You are fine.” Essek slowly, reluctantly holds out one of his hands, mouth pulling into a tight line at the swelling around the now-healed breaks, at the raw, new skin that covers them. “Thank you. I… appreciate it.”

The salve is dark gold, and nearly as thick as wax. Caleb warms it between his palms. Tiny flames flicker over the backs of his hands for a moment, and when he draws them apart, the salve has turned half liquid. Slowly, Essek extends his hands. Caleb takes one carefully, _carefully_ between both of his, and Essek cannot keep from flinching. He is not accustomed to touch in general, and for the past few weeks… There was no kindness in any of the touches he received, down in that dark and awful cell.

“It is the least I can do.” Caleb glances up at Essek’s face, and his eyes are apologetic. “This will hurt.”

“I am sure I will survive,” says Essek, dryly, setting his jaw against the discomfort. There’s a hitch in his breathing as Caleb starts rubbing the salve into his skin, though, that he cannot entirely hide.

It does hurt. Caleb’s not wrong. But it’s a dull ache, almost healing in a way, and it does ease the pain and stiffness a little. That doesn’t explain the sudden urge he has to burst into tears, though, or the fist that’s suddenly taken up residence in his throat. He stares fixedly at the wall, trying to memorize the cracks in the tile and keep his breathing steady with little success

Each push of Caleb’s callused fingers against his palm sends a twinge through him before the pain eases. His other hand curls into a loose, aching fist in his lap, restless.

Caleb reaches his fingers, and Essek catches the inside of his cheek between his teeth, pressing down hard enough to remind himself to stay quiet. Compared to everything else, this pain is nothing. But the urge to scream still claws at him.

Caleb draws at his ring finger, and Essek finally snatches his hand away.

“ _Ghkk—”_ He inhales sharply and then forces himself to exhale slowly through his nose, to straighten from where he has hunched over his throbbing hand. “It will pass,” he murmurs, unsteadily, more to himself than Caleb. He’d kept himself almost-sane with those words, in the dungeon— though, then, he’d assumed it would pass when they finally grew tired and killed him. “ _It will pass_.”

“It will,” agrees Caleb, a frown creasing his forehead.

Essek offers his hand back.

Just as gently as before, Caleb takes it, slowly working the salve into his smallest finger before exchanging that hand for the other. “Beau said something about finding clay, to build strength in your hands again, once you are ready,” he says, softly. “But only when you are ready. Do not worry about being of use to us. They do not think like that. … _I_ do not, when it comes to you.”

He imagines Caleb would know. They are, after all, quite similar to one another. Both used to weighing relationships in transactions and favors. At least, Essek thinks, he succeeded in keeping copies of his spell books tucked away in their pocket plane—though it had cost him dearly. That, at least, will ensure his usefulness after he is healed and well.

Essek shakes his head, trying to clear it, and finds Caleb’s eyes on his face. He glances away, unable to bear the intensity of eye contact right now. “You know what this is like, I think. Yes? The… aftermath, of—” He pauses, and swallows. “I will be fine. Am fine.”

Caleb sighs. “I do. It… It will not be easy. But they make it better.” He looks toward the door, an indecipherable expression on his face. “…They… love you… very much. Even if we are putting ourselves at risk, we will not stop. Not for someone that they— _we_ — love.”

 _Luxon_ , that’s— Essek swallows, suddenly unsteady. There are four rows of colored tiles on the wall cutting through the black marble. He counts the ones he can see until the dizziness fades, and he can draw a smooth breath again.

“…Your friends choose to put their affections in the strangest of places,” he remarks, eventually, after his stomach stops turning somersaults at the enormity of what Caleb has just said.

“I am aware.” Caleb lets out a soft, hoarse laugh. “But… we are better for it, no? I am grateful to them.”

They pass another few minutes in quiet as Caleb works his way along Essek’s fingers. He cannot stop the occasional hiss of pain as Caleb’s fingers dig into a particularly tender spot, but he does not cry out again. When Caleb has finished, his hands no longer feel half-broken. He flexes both of them an inch at a time, teeth gritted, and does not need to scream. They do ache, still, especially around the joints—he imagines will for a while.

He imagines the scars on his wrists will last for a long time, too, cuffs he will not be able to shake off. It would be pure vanity to ask Jester to remove them, but… he does not want to carry these. To be reminded every time he sees his hands of what has been done to him. At least he cannot see the mess left on his back.

Perhaps he will take to wearing gloves.

Caleb rubs the residual salve into his own hands, and then pushes the tray of uneaten food over to Essek, expression hopeful, a furrow dug into his brow.

Taking the spoon is clumsy and uncomfortable—but not as painful as it would have been before the massage.

“The salve… helps,” says Essek, a little reluctantly. “Thank you.”

“I will pass it along to Caduceus,” says Caleb, with a crooked little smile that pulls at the corner of his mouth. The suppressed delight in his voice is charming, in a strange sort of way. “And… you are welcome.”

They sit together for a while, in silence, as Essek eats the lukewarm porridge in tiny bites—carefully, cautiously, as though his jaw might break again, or his stomach rebel. Perhaps both. The latter certainly feels like a distinct possibility still. Between that and his unsteady hands, the consumption of even a spoonful is a painful, protracted affair, punctuated by intermittent noises of frustration and discomfort that slip out through his gritted teeth.

Caleb does a passable job of pretending not to watch, and of pretending that he does not itch to _help_. It is… irritating, and simultaneously unsettlingly endearing that he is even bothering to pretend.

“I don’t— I don’t know how to thank you, and your friends,” says Essek, eventually, when he’s managed a few mouthfuls. The porridge sits heavy and uncomfortable in his stomach, almost nauseating. But the smell and taste of food after days, _weeks_ of deprivation is waking his long-neglected sense of hunger, and the urge to devour the bowl as fast as possible is suddenly strong. “I don’t know how to pay you back, for— for what you have done. …I do not know if you even realize what you have done. What you— saved me from.”

The words taste sour in his mouth. The fact that he had to be saved at all is something he would rather not acknowledge.

“Let us help you,” says Caleb, almost immediately, voice low and earnest. “Be our friend. I do not know what else we can ask of you.”

He looks at Essek, deliberate and lingering, and it feels as though he is looking _into_ him. Caleb’s eye contact, uncommon though it is, always feels like a knife against his skin—too incisive. Too _knowing_.

Caleb’s jaw works, and he looks away, and Essek breathes again with a sudden heave of aching lungs. “They… saved me, too, you know,” he says, quietly. “Not from execution, but… from myself. From people who would have seen me dead, or worse.”

“I am… sorry,” says Essek, quietly— and to his surprise, finds he means it. “You have only shared a fragment of your history with me—as I have shared only a fragment of mine with you—but I gather that… the world has been cruel to you.” He reaches out to touch the back of Caleb’s wrist, a faint brush of crooked fingers over a scattering of reddish hairs and the start of an old, bone-white scar. “You do not deserve that. You are a good man. A— a kind man.”

Caleb shakes his head, blinking rapidly. “I— _if_ I am, it is because they have made me so.” He tips his hand palm-up under the touch, curls his fingers gently around Essek’s. The warmth of his skin sinks bone-deep into Essek’s joints, soothing the ache of them more effectively than any salve. “I try to be. To be worthy of them and the faith they place in me.” He looks up and meets Essek’s eyes, and there is again that same _intensity_ in them. Essek knows, briefly, what it is to be a butterfly pinned to a board. “You see, then, what is to come? They will not let you run away from them, or from yourself. And it will be… painful, in some ways. But you will heal, with time.”

“You are suggesting I am stuck with you all forever, then,” says Essek, the hint of a smile curling at the corner of his lips. His fingers tighten around Caleb’s hand in an unsteady, determined grip.

“Ja, more or less.” Caleb returns the smile, small and hopeful. “It is as Veth said— welcome to the Mighty Nein.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The authors thrive on comments! 🖤💜🖤
> 
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**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Of the Body Condemned [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27086632) by [adriiadventures](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adriiadventures/pseuds/adriiadventures)




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